After four weeks of traveling around I arrived at a nature reserve in South India, feeling quite disillusioned. I found sleeping accommodation with a German guy whose name was Klaus and who had married an Indian woman. He lived from growing pepper and from renting to tourists who stayed with him.
Even in India, throughout the whole time my daily place of worship was still the toilet bowl. As my desperation grew, I was filling many pages with writing in my dairy, but I was living the same life as in Germany. There was no escape. I was not looking for an ashram, or a guru, I wanted to be free.
One night I was sitting on the porch in the full moon night, with the three-meter high pepper shrubs in front of me. Once again I was overcome by the almost compulsive desire to put an end to this life, to just go mad and leave the body. I just couldn’t stand it any more. Everything ached from the incessant overeating and throwing up, and I had an infection in my mouth, which I got from greedily eating unripe papayas. I wrote and pleaded imploringly, praying to the moon goddess, and I managed to survive yet another night.
The following morning Klaus told me about Vipassana, a Buddhist meditation technique that he had encountered in a meditation center in Igatpuri, a village near Mumbai. There, all of a sudden, was a way out. The same evening I packed my stuff and took off in a hurry. The journey took me more than 2000 kilometers from Kerala, a state in the south of India, all the way up north to the Indian state of Maharashtra and the small village of Igatpuri, some five hours east of Mumbay by bus. Day and night I was traveling by bus, and thanks
to the support of many friendly people I managed to arrive there in time for the beginning of the meditation course in the morning. The last part of the bus ride led through an extremely wide plain bordered by a very large mountain range. The sky was radiantly blue and clear. Sleeping Indian people surrounded me, wrapped up in their blankets and scarves, in order to protect themselves from the early morning chill while the bus went jolting along the ramshackle road. In a little town about two hours before my destination a young man got on the bus. He was dressed in dark red clothes. He set next to me. We started a conversation and he told me that he was on his way to Ganeshpuri (5) to the ashram of his guru, a woman whom he called Gurumayi. I couldn’t understand a thing he said. Ganeshpuri seemed to be a village that was only a few kilometers further than Igatpuri. He took out a picture album and showed me colored images of Gurumayi. She was also dressed all in red, and looked very beautiful, erotic and sublime. During the remainder of our conversation he begged me more and more imploringly to come along with him to Ganeshpuri to see his guru. I still couldn’t understand what he actually wanted from me, and I refused his pleas in a friendly but determined manner. As I was leaving the bus the man began to cry. Tears were flowing down his face. He looked at me with disappointment through the bus windows as the bus continued honking on its way.
I soon forgot the strange encounter on the bus and I rushed up to the meditation center, which was situated above the town. The streets and alleys were filled with the noise coming from the honking cars and many speakers playing Hindi popular music. A huge pagoda with a high golden spire dominated the Buddhist center. At that time the center could hold several hundred people in one meditation course. After registration I was asked in a friendly manner to change my clothes as I was dressed in my troubadour outfit, which was very extrovert. I was given a lunghi (6) and a simple T-shirt to wear for the duration of the course. This Vipassana course was taught in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin and his disciple Goenka, who had brought this forgotten meditation practice from Burma back to India. It took place over a period of ten days, in total silence. The participants sit in meditation in a special hall where they receive instruction from both men and women teachers, practicing from very early in the morning to late at night. Everything happens in silence and in a sitting position. The first three days of meditation consist of Anapana, the observation of the breath as it flows in and out. In this way the attention is sharpened and the mind becomes quieter. From the fourth day onwards the Vipassana technique is taught. The meditators begin to observe the body, the emotions and the thoughts in a certain manner that becomes increasingly finer. This is how Anicca (7) is revealed – the understanding that everything comes and goes.
I immediately felt at home. I no longer wanted to run away. My favorite part was the silence and the temporary freedom from the responsibility for my eating disorders. The meals were served in the morning and in the evening, in the afternoons there was only fruit available, and that was all. The meditation sittings started in the early morning hours, interrupted only by short breaks and meal times, and went on into the late evening. Then we were given instructions for the next day.
I followed the discipline and the rules exactly, and I even stepped it up by extending my sitting sessions. Through the application of my will I wanted to break through the limitations of physical pain and psychological despair.
On the fourth day the image that I have had of myself completely collapsed. I gave up my pointless self-flagellation. I recognized my deep contempt for human life. I clearly saw my impulse to self-destruction and my hidden cynicism. It was a fundamental and harrowing metamorphosis, as if layers and masks were being peeled off from the body. I was afraid that everybody in the center could now see that up until now I had been merely wearing a mask of friendliness and that underneath that false surface there slumbered a categorical contempt for all things material and superficial. However all the other participants, hundreds of them, were having similar experiences, and I had to laugh about my newly acquired concerns. I had no more visions nor spiritual states. My gorging attacks finished quite abruptly. However, I felt the anxieties and the joys of the world more intensely than ever before. After the course I left this wonderful place as a different person. It was called Damma Giri and was the headquarters of the Vipassana academy. It was very difficult for me to leave, and I had no idea how I was going to get on with life now. A strange flickering sensation was now surrounding my body and just to look at another human being gave me great trouble.
I sat on a simple wooden bench at the bus station of Igatpuri, deliberating on how to proceed from here. I spontaneously decided to drive into the desert of Rajasthan. There was also a Vipassana center in the city of Jaipur, which I wanted to visit later.
I had bought some different clothes for myself and now looked like a western sadhu. I gave away my old clothes.
The longer the journey into the desert lasted the more I felt uncertain and confused. What had happened? What did all this mean? It didn’t make any sense to meditate for such long periods of time. Sure, I felt so much better. But my fear of humans had actually only increased. The meditation had set free some forces, which I could not control any more. As the bus drove ever deeper into the desert of Rajasthan I felt how this strange flickering sensation was increasing in my whole body. As usual, I chose my destinations intuitively, very often just on a whim, because I liked the name of a place. Two days’ journey from Jaisalmer, the brilliant desert fortress in Rajasthan, I stopped in a small town and quickly bolted into a simple hotel for pilgrims. Minute by minute my own body felt increasingly unbearable. Slowly the next crisis was approaching. Lying on the bed of the hotel in the darkened room, I began to write again. Everything that came up in my thoughts I put it down on paper so I could understand what was going on. I lay down on the floor and continued writing. The scribbling became more and more illegible. In the end only wild strokes were covering the paper. I lost all control over my body and was just scratching the paper. Suddenly I found myself, half willingly, half pushed, doing a headstand, and my mind seemed to plummet, circling and falling into infinity. This had to be the entrance into madness. That thought quickly arose as the room started to spin and colored circles swirled around me. But I was not afflicted by madness.
Suddenly love took hold of my heart, of my naked body, of the confused thoughts. At the very bottom of my crash I actually found love. The origin of everything is love. Everything is made of love, everything lived by it. This feeling spread into every cell. Love. It was so simple.
I immediately left the room and walked through the little town in wonder and amazement. To this day I still don’t know the name of that little town. I entered a chai-shop, which was empty, entirely painted in light-blue paint, and lit with bright neon lights. I stared out onto the street where it had, oddly enough, very lightly started to rain.